if it were put to us, "Do you really mean you would rather they should
not perpetually have been again for a look-in at Berlin, or an awfully
good time at Munich, or a rush round Sicily, or a dash through the
States to Japan, with whatever like rattling renewals?" you would after
all shrink from the responsibility of such a restriction before being
clear as to what you would suggest in its place. Rupert went on reading-
parties from King's to Lulworth for instance, which the association of
the two places, the two so extraordinarily finished scenes, causes to
figure as a sort of preliminary flourish; and everything that came his
way after that affects me as the blest indulgence in flourish upon
flourish. This was not in the least the air, or the desire, or the
pretension of it, but the unfailing felicity just kept catching him up,
just left him never wanting nor waiting for some pretext to roam, or
indeed only the more responsively to stay, doing either, whichever it
might be, as a form of highly intellectualised "fun." He didn't overflow
with shillings, yet so far as roving was concerned the practice was
always easy, and perhaps the adorably whimsical lyric, contained in his
second volume of verse, on the pull of Grantchester at his heartstrings,
as the old vicarage of that sweet adjunct to Cambridge could present
itself to him in a Berlin cafe, may best exemplify the sort of thing
that was represented, in one way and another, by his taking his most
ultimately English ease.

Whatever Berlin or Munich, to speak of them only, could do or fail to do
for him, how can one not rejoice without reserve in the way he felt what
he did feel as poetic reaction of the liveliest and finest, with the
added interest of its often turning at one and the same time to the
fullest sincerity and to a perversity of the most "evolved"?--since I
can not dispense with that sign of truth. Never was a young singer
either less obviously sentimental or less addicted to the mere twang of